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Futuremark® released its first trailer for the next version of 3DMark®. Designed for measuring the gaming performance of everything from tablets and notebooks to high-end desktop gaming systems, the next 3DMark for Windows will be the world's first unified graphics benchmark allowing testing of DirectX 9, DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 capable hardware through the DirectX 11 API. Expected to be released after the launch of Windows 8, this new 3DMark will also be compatible with Windows 7 and Windows Vista.

"In a talk held at Aalto University in Helsinki Finland, Linus Torvalds addressed a question from one of the audience members regarding issues they had with a laptop running NVIDIA graphics and the lack of support for Linux. Linus' response can only be described as a very coarse and honest answer, skip to 48:14 to watch the question and his response. The complaints were regarding Optimus and Linux support and watch the video for more..."

"Microsoft said then that only Windows 7 PCs are eligible for a full upgrade to Windows 8, one that retains applications, data files, user accounts and Windows settings. Windows Vista and Windows XP machines can be upgraded to Windows 8 -- assuming the hardware meets the system requirements of the new OS -- but cannot bring along all the bits. Vista users who upgrade will retain user accounts and files, as well as Windows settings, but not already-installed applications. XP-to-Windows 8 upgrades preserve the least amount in a move: User accounts and files only."

"Computex Taipei might be over already but we still have a couple of stories from there to fill. Here we take a look at some of the Opteron and Trinity APU FM2 motherboards and Radeon 7000 series GPUs, presented to you by the fabulous AMD booth girls." -Read more

"In Windows 8 it looks like the ChkDsk utility will get a revamp to speed it up. Microsoft also tweaked NTFS, the Windows OS file system so that the NTFS "health model" conceived the machine's hard disk as a single unit that was either well or damaged, and took the machine completely offline and made unavailable to the end user while ChkDsk ran. In Windows 8, however, the NTFS scans for problems in the background while the system remains online, and an initial attempt to fix problems on-the-fly."

"The company said that it will now award $20,000 for any bug that allows code execution on its "production systems". Google will also pay $10,000 for SQL injection bugs as well as for "certain types" of information disclosure, authentication, and authorization bypass bugs. The previous top reward of $3,133.70 now applies to "many types of XSS, XSRF, and other high-impact flaws in highly sensitive applications."

"In what will certainly be controversial and disappointing to some Radeon Linux desktop users, AMD will soon announce that they will effectively be discontinuing support for several Radeon product families from their proprietary Catalyst driver. After that point, for future Linux distribution updates, the open-source Radeon Linux driver will be your only option for accelerated graphics. This is likely happening with the Windows Catalyst driver too, but at least there they have a better-maintained legacy driver process.

"GameStop could ban the PlayStation 4 if it blocks the use of pre-owned games.

We already know that publishers and developers despise the second-hand market. They claim they're losing money because these consumers aren't purchasing the pricy, mint copies. Only the retailers are generating revenue from these used games and thus are driving prices of the retail versions upwards.

But some of us on the consumer side say we flock to used versions because new copies are just too damn expensive. We bought the hardware, and we should have the right to play second-hand copies..."